'It's always been such a rigid framework - either you choose to be an Anglophile, or you consider yourself Chinese. But it's so ridiculous: it's like when somebody said to me that since I admired Queen's Pier so much I must have feelings for the colonial era, and not for China,' Mr Chan said.

Fellow Local Action activist, Chow Sze-chung, agreed, saying: 'When we talk about Queen's Pier, it's not just about British monarchs having landed here. What we wanted to remember is how more than 30 local social movements had begun and happened right here.'

Their view embodies a popular sentiment that bubbled among intellectuals before the handover on July 1, 1997, and has soared to the forefront in the past few years: that beneath all the focus of Hong Kong as an incidental success story that resulted from the political manoeuvres between two political powers, there's also a Hong Kong story to be written. In this story a Hong Kong-specific cultural identity - an indigenous mix of the city's history, from its social upheavals and heritage to its popular culture - plays a central role.

And it's a mass social movement which basically propelled Mr Chan, his fellow activists and probably even more of the city's residents in acknowledging that there is a society out there and not just a co-existence of cynical, get-rich-quick individuals. Hackneyed this might sound, but the demonstration on July 1, 2003, instilled into many a Hongkonger a communal spirit and local consciousness that had been more or less ambivalent, or even absent, in the past.

Of course, it's not as if there weren't efforts to galvanise a 'Hong Kong spirit' before that - who could forget the government's ill-fated 'Hong Kong for Sure' campaign in 1999 to secure the hosting rights to the 2006 Asian Games, or former financial secretary Antony Leung Kam-chung's cringe-worthy rendition of Below the Lion Rock in his budget speech in March 2002 to conjure public sympathy for his initiatives?

The swathes of people who filled Victoria Park, Hennessy Road and then Queensway en route to the Central Government Offices four years ago, generated a spirit of a different kind: that being a Hongkonger does not engender merely nostalgia and sentimentality, but also a base for social action.

'The July 1 marches were certainly a watershed for the development of a cultural identity for Hongkongers as for the first time the participants saw themselves in a subjective role,' said Eric Ma Kit-wai, an associate professor in journalism and communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He saw something new to the construction of a new Hong Kong-specific identity this time, compared with similar events decades ago, whether it be the movement for the legitimisation of the Chinese language or the birth of indigenous Canto-pop in the late 1970s.

'Back then, the advocacy of local culture was more rooted in things like popular culture, for example,' he said. 'Now, the mass media have helped in refracting the energy of the mass movements into a higher political realm, with the evolution of a local consciousness producing public initiatives about government policy, such as in conservation.'

Having conducted surveys on local and national identities in Hong Kong since 1996, Professor Ma admitted he had imagined a decade ago that Hongkongers would have a 'more ambiguous and diluted' affiliation with their local identity as the years rolled by. 'It was certainly true during the first few years, as people tried to come to terms with their position [in the Chinese social framework],' he said.

And the numbers did tally up to that effect. In the polls he conducted with colleague Anthony Fung Ying-him, people who identified themselves only as Hongkongers dropped from 25.2 per cent in 1996 to 21.5 per cent in 2006; meanwhile, nearly 60 per cent claimed a mixed Hong Kong-Chinese identity last year, compared to just 47 per cent in 1996.

Beyond the opinion polls lies a different story, Professor Ma said, with advocacy groups for local culture going from strength to strength - as shown by the vocal antagonism against reclamation, the removal of Queen's Pier and the government's forced postponement of the West Kowloon Cultural District, a project which ran into strident opposition from a united front of artists, politicians and grass-roots activists.

Collective strength is nearly always born out of harsh circumstances - and Hong Kong has certainly been a hotbed for the nurturing of its own cultural identity, given the economic and social winters the city has battled through in the past decade.

The sharp recession brought about by the Asian economic crisis in 1998, for example, gave rise to an officially orchestrated campaign to pull ourselves together - products of which include the 'Hong Kong For Sure' project, and the Flying Dragon logo that was meant to be a confidence-booster for a city in dire straits.

Then there were former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa's ever-changing attempts to position Hong Kong: a competitor against London and New York one year, an aspiring major Chinese city the next. And finally there was the Sars outbreak. As Hong Kong plunged further into desolation and misery, popular culture - under the aegis of a government desperate to deflate public antipathy - produced relics such as 1:99, a collection of 12 short films from Hong Kong directors (each of which received government subsidies of HK$500,000) with the common theme of raising post-Sars public morale.

Many might question whether such an aspiration for a Hong Kong-specific cultural identity has anything to do with the handover at all. Certainly, the circumstances which drew the local population together in pursuit of a common lineage of collective memory might not seem directly linked to the change of guards on July 1, 1997. But the transfer of sovereignty has spawned many of the situations which forced people to vocalise their concerns en masse.

The most explicit example, of course, is the July 1 demonstration, spurred by discontent towards the flawed decisions made by a Tung administration. The Sars epidemic, meanwhile, could be partly blamed on ramshackle communications between Hong Kong and the mainland.

Not that the traditional mainland-Hong Kong chasm has disappeared altogether, however. The differentiation which shaped how Hongkongers saw themselves in the 1980s - with television series and films separating the civilised, affluent 'us' from the uncouth, impoverished 'them' across the Lo Wu River - has remained, and it is something that both the government and the general population have used for their own ends.

The most glaring example was in April 1999, when the then Secretary for Security Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee declared that up to 1.67 million mainlanders would come to Hong Kong if a court ruling giving right of abode to mainland-born children of Hong Kong residents was not overturned. Branded by human rights activists as a 'scare tactic', Mrs Ip's remarks inadvertently shaped mainlanders as a marauding mass hovering at the gates.

The transformation of mainland arrivals to Hong Kong in the past two years - from poor cousins to moneyed tourists - reveals the conflicting sentiments Hongkongers have in terms of how they see the 'other' and themselves. 'On the one hand we want to earn their money, but on the other we still want to see them as backward people who couldn't compare to our sophisticated selves,' says Sze Lai-shan, a social worker with the Society for Community Organisation who has worked since 1996 for the rights of mainland immigrants. And in this lies the schism within the Hongkonger: an identity that remains in flux, whether Queen's Pier remains or not.